Vilya has kept busy with some more portraits this week. These two sparkling looking fellows below are two of the Fae elders, there are four of them in total. They all represent one season each, can you guess which?

Since we’re starting to have quite a few characters in the game now, we’ve been considering ways to make it visually clear who are more important than others. As a result we’ll most likely go over the portraits once more and make the main characters stand out a bit more in terms of detail and design, and, on the other end, make sure that the lesser characters aren’t too fancy.

While this revamp will probably have to wait until the last stages of development we’re definitely keeping this in mind for our future character designs, and have already done so in regards of the Fae: while the two Fae’s pictured above are important to the storyline and the Fae society in general, there two are not:
How do you feel about us differentiating main character vs filler/sidequest characters this way?

We’ve seen many different methods used in games, all ranging from side characters not having portraits at all, to letting them be extremely drab or even have the same 4-5 portraits reused for all characters that aren’t important to the plot. At the moment we think what we mentioned above is the best way for our game, but we’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

Fred on the other hand has been busy with some outside projects. Below is the final assignment for an animation course he has been taking the last few months! It’s a bit choppy at times due to some exporting issues from Flash, but we hope you’ll enjoy it in spite of that :)

Be prepared for some glorious Grindea animations when the game is closing in on release!

I’m against doing that to your characters. I would rather just have a fancy border around the portrait for important characters, and not have the important ones all look like royalty, but the others like peasants.

What I mean is, you have some random royal character. He gets pretty royal portrait, but no fancy border, because he’s not an important character.
We have a peasant, and he gets scruffy portrait, but his border is shiny because he has an important quest.

Bloody wrote at 02/04/2013 07:24:

I’d rather have a border or something else rather than unpolished portraits as well.
I do think it would also make it easier to identify, since some characters might not have all that fancy style anyway.

Though I can understand leaving the less important characters’ portraits unpolished will probably cut some time on development in general.

Thanks for your comments! Your border idea sounds interesting and we’ll look into it. However, I think you’ve misunderstood what we meant! We will not make important characters look like royalty and everyone else like peasants, nor will the less important characters be less polished.

The changes we want to make is in details such as the main characters sporting colors that pop a bit more and let them feel more unique in terms of haircuts or clothing design, things that will not change their status in society.

Perhaps the Fae were a bad example to showcase this as the two main characters are also, in fact, very important to their society and therefore will look more ‘expensive’ as well, making the difference much more apparent than it would have been between two characters of the same class.

Hope this cleared it up, and please keep sharing your opinions :)

Advert wrote at 02/04/2013 12:15:

Thanks for clearing that up!

As an alternative to borders (or compliment to), how about a fancy nameplate on story characters? You could even extend this– have specially themed nameplates for different quest-lines!

McToast wrote at 02/04/2013 13:31:

Moin

I’m perfectly fine with a pool of 4-5 portraits for not so important characters. It would be ok for me if, say, the shopkeepers or guards would always look the same (only of the same race of course :>). I wouldn’t mind if characters who appear only 2-3x on my screen anyway wouldn’t have unique graphics.

I’d rather like to see a lot more different locations, like desert, swamp, jungle etc. ;).

Grüße,
regards,
the Toast

Sogomn wrote at 02/04/2013 17:26:

I think, it is the best way to use some character portraits for the less important characters.
It is impossible to give every creature a own image.
You are doing a great job! Keep it up! :)

Yangna wrote at 03/04/2013 04:09:

Cost & Delay concerns aside, I for one would love to see equal visual importance/uniqueness/details in all characters, because:
1- It’s fine in terms of gameplay, the blue/yellow “!” being enough to indicate who you should go to for a main/side quest.
2- It’s good for immersion, as each character feels like a unique part of something important (Grindea), and might give you a quest in the future (good investment for future updates in that respect). I want to feel immersed in the whole game, not just the main storyline.

That said, such a feature can be costly.
In my experience game developers tend to cut costs in that area because:
a- It’s standard to have less polished filler NPCs, so although it hurts quality, it doesn’t hurt player satisfaction because we aren’t expecting any better.
b- It scales badly: the more content you produce, the heavier the cost of highly polished NPCs, since you have to be consistent in all areas of the game.
c- In the content department, it is often regarded as a lower priority compared to more quests / richer environments.

Finally, since the reason you mention behind these changes is to improve on your game and not to save time/money, I think it’s fine to keep all characters unique, for above reasons, provided that it is not detrimental to other, arguably more important, aspects of the game (quests, polished areas etc…).

Regards,

Yangna

Colamisu wrote at 03/04/2013 11:15:

Personally, I really don’t think it’s necessary to specify to players which NPCs are important. We’re generally smart enough to discover that on our own through the subtle nuances in gameplay. For example, NPC A’s dialogue hasn’t changed since I completed a major quest objective. He’s unimportant.

That said, I would go a non-dialogue route if I were to try and specify importance. I’d assume the main point of specifying who’s important and who isn’t would be so players don’t have to waste time talking to an NPC if the NPC won’t say anything important. Since you can’t see portraits without talking anyway, using those doesn’t really save much time.

Overall, I think the identification of questgivers via the speech bubble exclamation points, as it is now, is plenty. Only further step I would consider is adding a few other speech bubble things for important non-quest NPCs. I.e. vendor speech bubbles with a simple icon to ID them. But then you have to worry about breaking immersion, cluttering the screen, etc.